


Taming

by quietlyPained



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Dark, Dream Bubbles, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Feral Behavior, I'm Going to Hell, Past Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-07
Updated: 2018-05-07
Packaged: 2019-05-03 18:01:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14574525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietlyPained/pseuds/quietlyPained
Summary: It's like approaching a wild animal.





	Taming

It's like approaching a wild animal, or a dog who's been abused and doesn't trust a single troll coming towards him, you think. 

Your approach is slow and gentle, and you don't even have a weapon on you - your claws have been filed down to dull roundness, your trident is outside the newly retired battleship. Each step is soft and made with confidence. Your coronation isn't even for another few nights, so your jewelry is minimal - golden rings on the pointer, middle, and pinky fingers of your left hand, and on the pointer and ring of your right. 

On your right hand, the ring from your moirail is what catches your eye - it's his color and yours, something he'd had crafted for you, and a match for him, once your pale feelings for him matched his for you. The thought of your moirail alone calms you and gives you the strength to move forward and approach the psion in the helm.

He growls and snaps at you, probably because you don't look like your predecessor. You don't look like the lithe, deadly Empress he spent thousands of sweeps serving. You're a bit softer, and you haven't hit your final growth spurts, let alone your last molting.

You're the youngest Empress to be crowned in all of recorded history. Your maturity is still about a hundred sweeps away. It makes you bold and brave, at least in the newsfeeds, and the fresh face of the optimistic change that you will make. You're the embodiment of the first change he's seen since he was installed in the helm. Change he was promised to never see.

That phrase makes you shiver. _'Installed in the helm'._

It makes him sound like he was never alive, like he never had a life before the helm, and his one purpose in his span was to serve the Empress. You know better, though you don't know what his history actually entails. You know he had to have a life before this, because even your untrained eyes can tell that the biowires wormed their way into his system and he didn't grow up in the helm, like most strong psions did after their tests showed rare strength.

The ports in his skin, the ones that you can see, were installed while he was writhing in pain without anesthesia - they're crooked, the scar tissue around them thick. He was struggling when they were installed, so perhaps the helm had been a punishment for him, or perhaps he had ripped them out and needed them reinstalled. You can't tell for sure one way or the other, though.

His growls are weak and pitiful, and if you were crueler, maybe you would have laughed. His fangs look dull from disuse, and overall, he looks drawn and malnourished. So you don't go to him at first - no, your attention turns to the display on the wall opposite him. The biowires provide nutrition for a psion in the helm, and they can be controlled because every psion is unique - and for a rewards and punishments system.

Evidently, the last time it had been touched, he had been put on the bare minimum to keep him alive - everything about him is healthy except his weight. You override access to the panel with your new code, and you adjust his feeding.

You give him plenty. Enough to do more than sustain him, enough to make him gain weight. But you turn it down when you leave - he was trained as she wished, thousands of sweeps ago, and now he'll be trained as you see fit. Your coronation comes and goes. _Her Imperial Radiance_ , they call you, and your image is white and gold and fuchsia. The next time you visit him, he flinches from the tiara he sees, until you show him that you are not his abuser.

You reward him when he no longer growls and snaps at you when you enter the room - there's a permanent bump in his new intake, one that will initially make him gain weight. You reward him again when he lets you get close to him, and after a while you bring him some crackers.

He doesn't have a choice but to let you feed him, and you give him sips of water when he needs them. Of course, you don't feed him too much - his body needs to learn how to digest solid food and draw nutrition from it again.

You purr at him when he lets you touch him, lets your fingers roam his features. His cheeks have regained some volume, his skin isn't as dry, he looks more full of life. The life you're giving him; the life that she stole from him.

Only when you have his trust completely do you bring in the team of medicullers and technicians to begin breaking him free of the helm. Uninstalling.

Extracting sounds the best to you, really. You're not sure why, but you know that he technically wasn't imprisoned - he wasn't even thought of as a being, just a very, very expensive battery. Of course they never let him see the places that he was forced to take the ship. And he never was a battery, in your mind.

He cries from the pain, though. He shakes and he cries and he leans into your touch, wanting it all to stop, and then his arms are free. The ports are still there, but the biowires are free, and they dangle limp and dead from the helm, and his arms drop like dead weight around you.

His muscles are atrophied. You saw that coming from leagues away, and you already have the best therapists on call, and in blocks in the Palace. He cries as he relaxes against you, and screams as his ochre blood begins to pump through his arms again, and you shush him gently, you coo into his ear, and his tears come to a stop.

When they free his legs, his tears resume, and you bear his weight alone, and his arms twitch like he's trying to hold on to you, but his muscles won't respond. You coo in his hear, you tell him how good he's doing, how he's free and how he'll never be used like that again.

When you set him down on the gurney, there's another change. That's the first time he smiles at you. And it's genuine and sincere and all you can do is smile back.

But you still have bigger plans for him. The time will come, eventually; you just have to be careful about every step of the process.


End file.
